Conquerors of the Sky

by Thomas Fleming

  As Cliff gulped air to control his stomach, a thin sallow-faced man with bloodless lips walked up to the rim and cried: “Propeller fatigue. It causes more crashes than anything else and those CAB bastards cover it up every time.” He merged a dozen reporters into an audience and made a speech about corruption in the CAB and Federal Aviation Authority. “They’re tools of the aircraft companies,” he yelled.

  “That’s the local congressman,” Coyne said. “The son of a bitch will say anything for publicity. We haven’t even found the goddamn propellers yet.”

  The similarities with the New Jersey crash were numerous and chilling. The wings had come down some two miles from the fuselages’s crater. The breakup had apparently happened with no warning. There was no record of a distress signal, which every veteran pilot would send if he had an engine fire. “The biggest difference,” Coyne said in his undertaker’s drone, “is clear air turbulence. We’ve got reports from two pilots who said they ran into a lot of it just before the crash. An Air Force jock riding a B-Fifty-seven almost got his head rammed through his canopy.”

  In his pilot days Cliff had encountered some mild clear air turbulence. It was one of the most treacherous phenomenons of flight. Without any warning, a plane could collide with a swirl of air that knocked it up or down or sideways. It was like hitting a pothole in the sky. But the Starduster was built to fly through such obstacles with no more than an “oops” from the pilot to reassure the jangled customers.

  Once more Cliff participated in the grisly ritual of collecting pieces of the smashed plane and watching the CAB’s experts sifting it for clues. In a week they were at the same impasse they had reached in New Jersey. Something had torn the wings off the Starduster. But no one could explain how or why it happened.

  This did not stop Jeremiah Coyne from coming up with a solution. “Ground it.”

  “Let’s not do anything until I have a chance to talk to the man who designed this plane, Frank Buchanan,” Cliff said.

  Frank’s name was enough to check the rush to execution. Cliff flew back to California with the news and Adrian summoned the top brass to his office. He seemed dazed, unable to comprehend what was happening. Instead of taking charge, he let Cliff make his trumpet-of-doom report.

  Buzz McCall was inclined to accept the sentence. “They grounded the DC-Sixes in 1948 for six months,” he said. “It didn’t ruin them.”

  He was recalling a series of disastrous midair fires on Douglas DC-6s caused by a misplaced air scoop that sucked gas into the heating system during a fuel transfer from one wing tank to another.

  “Grounding will ruin this plane and this company,” Adrian said.

  “There’s only one alternative. Limit the airspeed,” Frank Buchanan said. “Cut it to two hundred and fifty.”

  “That’s slower than a DC-Six or a Constellation!” Adrian said.

  “I know that. But it will keep the plane in the air. Meanwhile let’s launch the biggest emergency research program in aircraft history to find out what’s wrong,” Frank said. “If we sit here and wait for the CAB to tell us, we’ll deserve to be out of business.”

  “How much will it cost?” Adrian said.

  “I have no idea. If I were you I’d go to the nearest moneylender and tell him you want a line of credit as wide as the Mississippi at its mouth and twice as long.”

  Adrian’s face was a grimace of pain. “All right. I’ll call the CAB.”

  On the way downstairs, Frank seized Cliff’s arm. “Find out if there were any modifications made on the engines or the wings of any of the planes since they went into service.”

  Cliff found there had been one fairly important change made after delivery. Passengers sitting near the huge propellers had complained of vibrations. The engineers had tilted the nacelles of the engines slightly, which in turn altered the angle of the propeller blades. Presto, the vibration vanished. Buzz’s boys had checked with design before doing this and Frank Buchanan’s initials were at the bottom of the page beside approved.

  When Cliff reported this to Frank Buchanan, he smiled forlornly. “That’s our first clue,” he said. “Now we’re ready to find out why the Starduster has been crashing. We’ll give it a scientific name. But the real reason will be unnameable, Cliff. It’s a punishment for Adrian’s evil will, his indifference to moral laws.”

  The ferocity of Frank’s hatred for Adrian made Cliff his defender. “I’ve got reasons to dislike him too, Frank,” he said. “But there’s a whole company at stake here. Thousands of people’s lives will be messed up if we go broke—including my own. Let’s find that scientific explanation for their sakes.”

  “Are you ready to risk your life to find it, Cliff? I sense so much evil swirling around this plane—it’s going to be very dangerous.”

  Cliff thought of Tama’s farewell note. Be a man. Maybe that too was part of the gift she was trying to give him with the Starduster. “I’ll take my chances if you will,” he said.

  Two months later, Cliff sat in the cockpit of a Starduster, strapped in by two sets of seat belts, as the plane headed for the Sierra Wave, a piece of sky above the Sierra Nevada Mountains famous for its turbulence. At the controls was Lieutenant Colonel Billy McCall, borrowed from the Air Force at Frank Buchanan’s request. Frank sat beside him in the copilot’s seat. Frank had insisted on Billy. He seemed to think he had some special power to resist the forces that were trying to destroy the Starduster.

  Day after day for weeks now, they had flown Stardusters into the Sierra Wave, subjecting the planes to turbulence more violent than anything an airliner would ordinarily encounter in the sky. The company’s two thousand engineers then virtually dismantled the planes to study the effect of this extraordinary stress.

  In a half hour, the jagged snowcapped Sierras loomed on the horizon. By this time they had acquired personalities. They were a tribe of evil giants, spewing murderous winds. “Hang on!” Billy shouted as an updraft sent the airliner bouncing a thousand feet. A second later, a howling wind shear cut the air from beneath the wings, leaving the propellers clawing in a near vacuum. They dropped straight down like a stalled helicopter for three thousand feet.

  To Cliff’s amazement, they did not slide into a spin. Somehow, Billy kept the plane perfectly trimmed. “Jesus, Pops, I’m glad you thought of asking me to this party. I haven’t had this kind of fun since the old White Lightning rocket plane days,” Billy said.

  “Get back up to twenty-five thousand feet,” Frank said. “We’re going to give these wings the ultimate test today.”

  In the passenger compartment, the seats had been replaced by sandbags weighing 97,000 pounds, the full gross load of the plane. Billy slowly climbed back to 25,000 feet, relit the cigar clenched in the corner of his mouth asked: “Now?”

  “Now,” Frank said.

  They dove into that cauldron of violent air, down, down with the airspeed needle rising up the dial in weird counterpoint to their descent. Past 400 miles an hour, past 425, the Skyduster’s top speed, toward 500 miles an hour, probably faster than any commercial airliner had ever gone before. The raw brown slopes of the Sierras hurtled toward them.

  “Pull it out,” Frank said.

  “Hold together, you son of a bitch!” Billy howled and hauled on the yoke. The motors literally screamed in protest. The fuselage did a conga. The wings flapped as if they were made of feathers. The g forces hammered at Cliff’s brain. The memory of Schweinfurt swelled in his belly. But he fought his panic with new weapons. Tama’s farewell message: Be a man. Knowing his son Charlie would remember him dying this way. A wild resolve to prove he was just as tough as Billy McCall.

  Memory, fear, love, hate coalesced in the plane’s roaring struggle to survive the Sierra Wave’s turbulence. The next thing Cliff knew Frank Buchanan was asking him: “What kind of stress readings did you get on the outer wing?”

  They were still alive. The wings had stayed on.

  “High,” Cliff said, handing him the numbers he had just copi
ed with a shaking hand from the dials of the special instruments in front of him.

  “That’s an understatement,” Frank said, studying the figures. “That part of the wing is taking ten times more bending force than the rest of the wing. Who could believe that would happen from tilting a motor a few inches?”

  Back they flew to Buchanan Field. “One more trip like that and they’re going to need a spoon to get me out of this plane,” Cliff said.

  “Hey Big Shot, you’re doing okay,” Billy said. “I’m starting to believe you really flew those forty-nine missions over Krautland. I always thought Tama made it up for a press release.”

  “We’re finding something new on every flight,” Frank said. “Today could be the breakthrough. I’m betting those outboard engine nacelles will show us something.”

  Along with risking his life, Cliff was accumulating a graduate education in aerodynamics from Frank’s inflight lectures. By now he knew there were a hundred different kinds of flutter that can attack a plane in flight. Designers had learned to check it in various ways so it did not explode into an uncontrolled spasm that ripped steel struts and aluminum skin to shreds. They were trying to find out if a new unsuspected kind of flutter had gotten loose in the Starduster’s wing.

  Billy roared in for his usual perfect landing at Buchanan Field. Buzz McCall and his engineers swarmed around the plane. “I thought so,” Frank said, pointing to the struts holding the nacelles of the outboard engines. Two of them had bent inward from the g forces of the dive.

  “The same sort of bends on the engines from the New Jersey crash,” Cliff said.

  “Exactly,” Frank said. “In the Iowa crash, there were two struts broken. On to the wind tunnel. Cliff, ask Adrian to join our demonstration.”

  It was getting dark but Frank Buchanan had long since stopped paying attention to the clock. So had Adrian Van Ness. Cliff found him in his office conferring with Winthrop Standish, the company’s solemn, hawk-nosed attorney. The families of the victims of the two crashes were suing the airlines and Buchanan for millions of dollars. Adrian was trying to fend off the suits, clinging to his theory of pilot error.

  Adrian greeted Cliff with a bleak smile. “You’re back from the Sierra Wave in one piece. That’s the good news. Any bad news?”

  “Frank thinks we’ve got it figured out. He’d like you to come down to the wind tunnel,” Cliff said.

  “What’s going to happen down there?” Adrian asked.

  “I don’t know exactly.”

  “That’s part of your job—to find out in advance, Cliff. So I can deal with it. Forethought. You can’t use it without information.”

  “Frank isn’t giving out any information.”

  Cliff found it difficult to sympathize with Adrian’s fear that Frank would use the Starduster to diminish his power in the company. Those trips to the Sierra Wave had built something hard and cold into the center of Cliff’s self. He was risking his life to save this plane. It made him impatient with Adrian’s obsession with personal power.

  In Buchanan’s wind tunnel Adrian and Cliff found a one-sixteenth scale model of the Starduster sitting on a special mount, which could be manipulated to simulate movements in actual flight. Carefully, Frank Buchanan sawed through some of the struts and braces on the two outboard engines. They then adjourned to the control room and turned on the wind while Billy McCall “flew” the model from a panel in front of the window.

  “When I drop my hand, pull up the nose and cut the airspeed,” Frank said. “That’s what the pilot probably did in Iowa when he hit clear air turbulence.”

  The wind whooshed through the big gray tunnel for another minute, the miniature Starduster bouncing in the turbulence. Frank’s hand dropped, Billy jerked the model’s nose up and cut the airspeed fifty knots on his toy throttle. Before their appalled eyes, the small Starduster suddenly shook like a bone in the mouth of an angry dog. Thirty seconds later—Cliff was timing it on a stopwatch at Frank’s orders—both wings snapped off.

  Frank switched off the wind. It died away like the moan of an angry ghost. “Whirl mode,” he said.

  “What is it?” Adrian said. He looked as if he were barely breathing.

  “An extremely rare type of flutter. Two physicists wrote a paper on it in 1938. I’d forgotten it like everyone else until the wings started coming off.”

  Even Billy McCall, who thought he could handle anything he encountered in the sky, was aghast. “Why, Frank?” Buzz McCall said. “Why didn’t it just damp out like it would on any piston plane?”

  “Because the Starduster has turboprop engines,” Frank said. “Those turbines are spinning at thirteen thousand revolutions a minute. The propellers are turning at a thousand. The whole thing is a giant gyroscope. The moment a jolt broke or bent one of those weakened struts, the engine started to wobble. That started the propeller wobbling and the whole vibration was transmitted to the wing, which was built to flutter at three vibrations a second. Whirl mode, for some reason, slows down from ten to five to three cycles per second. The moment both the wing and whirl mode got to three per second you got—”

  “Dynamic coupling,” said Frank’s favorite designer, Sam Hardy.

  “Exactly,” Frank said. “What happens when a high musical note breaks a glass tuned to the same vibration level.”

  “Dynamic coupling,” Buzz muttered. He shuffled out of the wind tunnel building like a man who had suddenly aged twenty years.

  “It’s not your fault,” Frank called after him. “It’s not the fault of anyone who built the plane. It’s the sort of thing that can happen when you play God with other people’s lives—and call a plane crash-proof.”

  “That’s not true!” Adrian Van Ness cried, backing away from Frank as if he were some sort of supernatural being. “I’ve never done anything that wasn’t for the good of this company. I’ve lived for this company! Are you going to listen to me or this madman?”

  Billy McCall was smiling, enjoying Adrian’s terror. Buzz McCall was gone—wiped out by believing whirl mode was a curse Tama had put on him. The rest of the executives, mostly designers, swayed in the firestorm of emotion between Adrian and Frank Buchanan. Someone had to take charge. It was like flying the Rainbow Express over Germany. You had to be a leader whether you liked it or not, whether you believed in what you were doing or thought it was mostly insanity.

  Cliff Morris knew he looked like a leader—and he knew how to act like one. In that compressed room, with an explosion about to blow the company apart, he was the only man with some faith in the future. He still believed in the Starduster. It was Tama’s gift to him. It had already given him a new sense of manhood.

  “Wait a minute!” he roared. “Wait a minute! We’ve got a problem to solve. This isn’t a courtroom. It’s not the Spanish Inquisition either. Let’s all go back to our offices and sit down and try to solve it! It’s either that or start looking for other jobs.”

  “He’s right,” croaked a perspiring, trembling Adrian Van Ness, his eyes full of gratitude. That was the moment Cliff knew he was on his way to becoming president of Buchanan Aircraft.

  GOING SUPER

  Hatred—he was surrounded by hatred, Adrian Van Ness thought, staring into the darkness at 3 A.M. the next morning. The idea steadied him. Hatred was a force, a kind of airflow. He would use it to soar above the haters on wings of guile.

  Insomnia added a dry, cold clarity to Adrian’s mind. He had sat at the dinner table last night and confronted Amanda’s mindless hostility. He remembered the moment of decision, when he had ordered the nail driven into her brain. Did this woman—or any other woman or invisible spiritual entity in the universe have the ability to harm him? No, Adrian decided. Although the world was frequently incomprehensible, he did not believe it was controlled or even occasionally manipulated by invisible powers.

  Amanda was counterbalanced by his daughter Victoria. Her presence reminded him of Buchanan’s first breakthrough to prosperity. If there was such a thing as luck
, she was his talisman of good fortune. He told her nothing about the crisis at the company, of course. But he drew strength from her plaintive sympathy for his public woes with the Starduster.

  Philosophy aside, Frank Buchanan had demonstrated Adrian’s pilot error theory was nonsense. Their design was responsible for killing 120 people. They, not the airlines, could be liable for all the damages in the pending lawsuits. If this information in its present version got out, they might be headed for the nearest bankruptcy court. As a crucial first step he had to regain Frank’s support for the plane.

  He summoned Cliff Morris and Dick Stone to his office. “Do you agree with Frank—that I’m responsible for the Starduster’s crashes?” he asked.

  They both shook their heads. He discounted Cliff’s sincerity, although he was grateful for his support. He had sentimental ties to Frank and was, like most salesmen, a believer in luck. Dick Stone’s negative was the one Adrian valued. He was a fellow believer in the intellect’s cold unillusioned view of the world.

  They discussed how to persuade Frank Buchanan to fix the Starduster’s fluttering wing. Cliff volunteered to talk to him. Before the end of the day he was back with good news. Frank was ready to cooperate. “He even came up with a name for the redesign program—Project Rainbow.”

  “How much will it cost?” Adrian said, ignoring the gibe in Project Rainbow.

  “He’s discussing it with Dick Stone right now. It’ll be damn expensive, you can be sure of that.”

  The success of Project Rainbow required someone who did not get drunk at lunch and stay ossified for the rest of the day. Adrian hired an executive from North American and put him in charge of the engineering department. Buzz McCall sat in his office, a ghost of the swaggering son of a bitch who had intimidated everyone for two decades.

  At Dick Stone’s suggestion, Adrian decided to let Bruce Simons tell the whole truth about Project Rainbow. Bruce called in TV and newsreel cameras to film the one hundred Stardusters in service as they flew to Buchanan Field and had their motors stripped and wings rebuilt. Simultaneously, Adrian told Buchanan’s lawyers to negotiate a settlement with the airlines, accepting a 50 percent liability in the damage suits. The costs were terrifying but the Scorpion was still in production and bankers were impressed by Project Rainbow’s boldness.